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John McCain and Barack Obama both hope their choice of running mate shoves their rival out of the news.
Composite image by POLITICO

Quayle also stumbled on the debate threshold, blowing the question about whether he was ready take control of the country and making that unfortunate inference that his preparation mirrored that of President John F. Kennedy.

Since those debacles, the national parties have cranked up their debate prep classes and vice presidential candidates skip at their own peril. It’s a lesson worth repeating to this year’s lambs.

Make the choice you need to win — period

Political strategists will tell you that selecting a running mate is one of the most personal decisions a presidential nominee will make and that chemistry between the candidates is very important. That’s terrific, but isn’t this supposed to be about winning?

It’s pretty clear that President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson couldn’t stand each other, but they won.

President Gerald Ford might have kept that in mind in 1976 when he looked past his party’s rising conservative star, Ronald Reagan, and chose Dole, the ultimate insider, as his running mate.

Ford lost a tight race to President Jimmy Carter that might have gone the other way if Reagan had been on board to rally Republicans still reeling from the Watergate scandal.

Ford’s experience is particularly instructive to today’s candidates, because both are under intense pressure to select their chief primary rivals.

Many big Republican establishment players are sitting on their hands today waiting to see if McCain will invite their favored candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, to the ticket.

Likewise, a corner of the Democratic Party establishment is on the sidelines watching to see how New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton fares in the Obama vetting process.

Both men run the risk of choosing someone they like and not someone who will be liked by others, namely the activists and voters they will need to win in November.

Chemistry versus winning, it’s your call.

Don’t pick the last man standing

With Nixon ahead in the polls, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern struggled to find a running mate in 1972.

The big names, Mondale and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, turned down offers to become his running mate.

Then he dumped him in mid-campaign, replaced him with Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy in-law, handed Nixon a political argument about his judgment and wound up taking one of the biggest political thumpings in history by capturing only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

Note to nominees: Keep the B-listers in the cheap seats.

Correction: James B. Stockdale's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.

Mitt romney pick would help Mccain in Colorado but you it would hurt Mccain in VA,NC and probably GA which has its Native son Barr on the balot there also...... Mitt romney is too overated spent almost all of his family fortune a netted very little delagates